Miller: When it all goes bad, at least we’ll have the ski mountain

If you haven’t read it yet, please get a copy of “The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman and prepare to have your view go wide-angle.

Extremely wide-angle. Like from the beginning of humans’ time on Earth until the last vestiges of our existence are finally erased. Eventually, even plastic will disappear but it will take a couple hundred thousand years after we’re gone, and microbes will have to evolve the ability to eat the stuff. Yum.

Be warned, while you’re reading this book you won’t see things the same as usual. Your house, for instance, will begin to appear as Weisman sees it: a hillock at most, long since dismantled by the elements and overtaken by its new inhabitant: nature, heavy on the onion grass and ailanthus trees.

Viewed through this prism, you can’t help but wonder what will remain of Long Island in the long, long run. The answer, of course, if the waters continue to rise, is not much. Not much except Jayne’s Hill in Melville (401 feet) and, of course, the Riverhead Resorts ski mountain in Calverton.

The latter hasn’t been built yet, but someday Riverhead Resorts is hoping to flood the site with money, $2.5 billion at last count, to build eight theme resorts around a 90-acre manmade lake. The entertainment utopia is to include water, equine, wilderness, sports, spa and heritage themes, plus a convention center, a “poetic plaza with intimate courtyards,” and that famous 350-foot-tall indoor ski mountain.

Recently its backers hosted a community forum in Hampton Bays so that East Enders could ask questions. About 100 attended, to hear developers’ attorney Mitch Pally of Weber Law Group in Melville say, “We are very, very optimistic this project will work and will be a benefit,” as quoted by Hamptons.com. “There are 50 million visitors to New York City every day. I need to get one percent of them to Riverhead.”

Amid the dancing dollar signs, however, question marks arose from the crowd. And they had to do with the kind of long-range view author Weisman might approve of.

What, for instance, would be the impact of all this on the pine barrens? And what about employment? Pally reiterated the enticements: 2,100 construction jobs and 3,000 permanent. But won’t those 3,000 be of the minimum-wage variety? And on unaffordable Long Island, where will they all live?

Some answers came out of the forum, but I later went to Riverhead Supervisor Phil Cardinale, who was on the panel, for more. First, he stressed as he always does that Riverhead has no skin in this game. If the megatainment mecca never gets built, the town still earns as much as $16 million by the “drop-dead date” of March 12, 2011.

Regarding the pine barrens, Cardinale agreed there are valid wastewater issues to be settled. All that will be thoroughly addressed in the SEQRA process, of which 12 to 18 months lie ahead, he vowed.

As for housing, he said Riverhead has done “proportionately more than any other town on affordable housing,” and still more is anticipated via the new accessory apartment law and new developments downtown. Further, he expects Brookhaven and Yaphank to play a role, and maybe even Southampton if that town “ever gets more serious about affordable housing.”

The big issue hovering over everything is, of course, money. “That’s the $2.5 billion question,” Cardinale said. “Let’s get serious: assume it gets all its approvals, who’s going to finance this thing? To be honest, nobody, in this market.” But if we see a recovery of sorts in two years’ time, “Then they’ll be ready for prime time.”

At this point, with the economy in the ditch, that might sound wildly optimistic. Even in a bull market the Riverhead Resorts plan feels like a work of pure imagination.

But then again so did Disneyland. So did space travel. And so does Alan Weisman’s view of Earth’s future, long after we toxic humans are gone.

Secretly and selfishly, I hope that wacky ski mountain does rise from the flatlands of Calverton. I’d like to get a few runs in before the ice cap melts and the entire population of the East End climbs on top, trying to stay dry.